Even in the middle of the night, when you are immersed in the depths of your sleep, your brain organ still maintains an activity, even minimal. He composes stories, draws faces, invents situations – sometimes wacky, sometimes disturbing, often strange. However, upon awakening, these night creations frequently fade in the mists of oblivion and Your dreams are disturbed as you wake up.
This apparent contradiction between the richness of our dreamlike life and our difficulty in remembering it is the result of selective amnesiaand not any cerebral dysfunction. Explanations.
The paradox of the amnesiac dreamer
The works of Erin Wamsley, associate professor in psychology and neuroscience at Furman University (Greenville, South Carolina), demonstrate that practically all individuals dream regularlyeven those who claim the opposite. When the researchers interrup the sleep of the participants during the phases of intense brain activity, the latter systematically describe fragments of thoughts, scraps of stories, mental images which populated their minds a few seconds before. Repeated observations, which attest to the universal aspect that the dreamlike experience takes.
Only precise neurological damage can alter this ability to dream. The rare patients with lesions in certain brain regions lose this faculty, which leads to deep upheavals of their cognitive functions.
Dreams can be seen in several ways. From a personal point of view, they can be seen as nightties, but since the perspective of neuroscience, They actively participate in the balance of our brain. These can help us treat and integrate difficult emotions or traumatic experiences and give us a safe space to relive these experiences and symbolically analyze them. They also consolidate memory, helping the brain sorting into the manna of information he received during the day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8o9nruj6xu
How neurotransmitters influence our dreams
The memory of dreams obeys precise neurological mechanisms, explaining their ephemeral nature. Laboratory studies carried out by Wamsley have highlighted a particular phenomenon: the conservation of dreamlike memories closely depends on the moment of awakening. Without a period of awakening coinciding with the end of a dream, followed by a time of conscious reflection, these night experiences quickly disappear from our memory.
Imagine that you have a particularly lively and memorable dream and when you wake up, you still have a very clear feeling of it. You tell yourself that you will absolutely note it in a notebook as soon as you have opened your eyes. Only, the daily routine catches up with you; Your alarm clocks and you have to get up quickly to prepare your day. You are caught in the morning whirlwind: shower, breakfast, business preparation, etc. Your mind is gradually detached from the imprint of the dream And remains occupied by various tasks and concerns.
Several hours later, while you are at work or in progress, suddenly, your dream comes back to you. You try to remember its details, but the images are much more vague than when you wake up. You cannot remember that very vaguely of a few fragments, But global history has passed out.
This particularity is explained by the specific activity of neurotransmitters (the chemical messengers which allow neurons to communicate with each other) during sleep. The sleeping brain works according to a neurochemistry distinct from the state of awakening, which directly influences our ability to train and maintain memories. Nocturnal micro-acknowledgments, these brief natural sleep interruptions during which we change positions, play a role in this process: they create Uiric content memorization opportunities.
However, an overly high occurrence of these interruptions disrupts sleep cycles, Compromising its restorative quality. The brain must therefore maintain an optimal balance between the continuity of sleep and the possibility of preserving certain memories of our dreams.
The role of sleep cycles
Sleep takes place in four different phases : THE paradoxical sleep (Rem) and three phases of SNon-Paradoxal (Nrem). The first phase Nrem, ephemeral, gives way to the second, characterized by a slowdown in brain waves interspersed with brief electric salves. This stage occupies almost half the sleep time in adults. The third phase, said deep sleepmanifests itself at the start of the night and represents about a quarter of our rest. Finally, paradoxical sleep, marked by a brain activity close to awakening, occupies the last quarter of our night.
If the most perennial dreams generally occur during paradoxical sleep, with 80 % chance of memorization upon waking up Against 50 % for other phases, the ability to dream is not limited to this period alone. Morning dreams prove to be particularly memorable, our brain naturally becoming more active when approaching alarm clock.
A very large majority of us use a very common object to wake up: an alarm clock, or an alarm directly on the smartphone. Well these tools are real enemies of this memorization. According to Jing Zhang, researcher in cognitive neuroscience at the General Hospital of Massachusetts and the Harvard Medical School, the brutal awakening caused by an alarm increases cortisol levels (stress hormone). An interruption that immediately diverts attention to daily obligationsto the detriment of dreamlike memories.
Forgetting your dreams is therefore not abnormalon the contrary and they are not all made to be memorized. There too, the brain sorts and prioritizes, as it does with our memories of the day, and determines which is relevant to remember For you or not. Holding a newspaper summarizing your dreams is A great way to capture themwithout worrying about the consistency or logic of the story. The important thing here is Keep the essence of the storyand not necessarily the details.
- Even if we dream every night, our brain quickly erases these memories unless a wake up at the right time
- The activity of neurotransmitters during sleep makes dreams difficult to memorize, except in case of natural interruptions.
- A brutal alarm clock instantly diverts attention, often preventing the trace of our dreams.
